Category Archive
‘Great Race and vintage rallying’: 114 Posts

Wearing an aluminum berlinetta body crafted by Carrozzeria Touring of Milan, the 1939 Alfa Romeo 6C2500 carrying chassis number 915.033 has proven itself a show winner at places like Villa d’Este and Salon Prive. Its stately appearance hides a dark past, however, one that links the car to an Axis power leader and his beloved mistress. Once sold for $300 through the pages of Hemmings Motor News, the Alfa Romeo is now a featured lot at RM’s upcoming Paris sale.

Completed in 1939, the Alfa received a factory or dealer upgrade to Super Sport specifications, which added a trio of Weber carburetors to the car’s 2.4-liter, double overhead-camshaft, inline six-cylinder engine, boosting output from 95 horsepower to 110 horsepower. Combined with a lightweight Superleggera aluminum body and four-wheel independent suspension, the 6C2500 would have been an impressive performer in its day. Though details such as chassis number have been lost to history, one such Alfa Romeo was acquired by Italian Fascist Party leader Benito Mussolini, who gifted the car to longtime mistress Claretta Petacci.

History notes that Claretta Petacci and her brother, Marcello, were attempting to flee Italy in such a car in April of 1945, when their German-led convoy was stopped by Italian partisans. Claretta and her lover were captured and later executed, while the Alfa Romeo was seized by Italian authorities and sent to Livorno. There, the car fell into the hands of U.S. Army Air Corps Major Charles Pettit, who used the Alfa as his daily driver while stationed at Camp Darby in Italy. When his tour ended in 1949, Pettit shipped the car home to his family’s farm in upstate New York.

Pettit is said to have enjoyed the car on rural backroads for several years, at least until the engine snapped a connecting rod. Lacking the ability to repair the damage, Pettit simply pushed the car into a barn, where it would remain until a relative, Albert Harris, purchased the Alfa in 1967. A pre-restoration teardown commenced, but the work was never completed, and in 1970, the car was offered for sale in the pages of Hemmings Motor News.

Enter Ron Keno, a Mohawk, New York, high school teacher who dealt in antiques as a sideline. A student of Keno’s brought the car to his attention, and a deal was struck over the telephone to purchase the semi-disassembled car for the sum of $300. With the car came a story from Harris, identifying the Alfa as the very car that had once belonged to Mussolini’s mistress.

Intrigued, Keno began to research the tale, which led him to historian Richard Collier. Collier, in turn, referred Keno to Franz Spögler, a former German army officer who’d once served as Claretta Petacci’s chauffeur and bodyguard. Spögler remembered the Alfa well, though there was little that could be done to positively identify the car over the telephone or via written correspondence. In November of 1975, Spögler visited Keno in New York, and immediately recognized the Alfa as the car he’d driven Petacci in decades earlier. Proof came in the form of a German army tool roll, given to Spögler by a soldier encountered during a roadside repair; remarkably, the canvas and leather tool roll had remained with the car throughout its history on both sides of the Atlantic.

Circa 1979, Keno sold the partially restored car to collector Donnie Morton. Morton, in turn, sold the car to the Imperial Palace auto collection in Las Vegas, and there a cosmetic restoration was finally carried out before the car was put on display. In 1999, the Alfa once again changed hands, this time going to an owner determined to properly restore its mechanicals so that the car could be used in vintage rally competition.

The engine was sent to Italy for rebuilding, using parts supplied by Alfa Romeo authority Francesco Bonfanti. Once back together, the car was entered in the 2001 and 2002 running of the Mille Miglia Storica, before its owner agreed to fund a no-expenses-spared restoration with Garage Bonfanti. The work, which went so far as to recreate replicas of the original dashboard switchgear, reportedly took two years and cost a staggering €500,000 (roughly $625,000 in 2004).

Since its restoration (during which Francesco Bonfanti estimated that roughly 90 percent of the car’s bodywork is original), chassis 915.033 has gone on to earn a class win at the 2007 Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este and a Best of Show at the 2011 Salon Prive. As offered in Paris, the Alfa will include the correspondence between Keno, Collier and Spögler documenting the car’s history, and will also include the tool roll used to identify the car (courtesy of Ron Keno). Its past aside, as one of just 16 Alfa Romeo 6C2500s fitted by Touring with a berlinetta bodystyle, the car is both rare and desirable, and RM predicts a selling price between €1.9 – €2.4 million ($2.15 – $2.7 million) when the car crosses the block in Paris on February 4.

One of my favorite aspects of building traditional hot rods and gow jobs is that there’s just so much room for creativity and experimentation. Didn’t like how the twin-81 carbs ran last time? Try dual 97s. Heard that Stude V-8s are untapped high-compression colossuses? Drop one in and see! This, along with our reverence for the past and our pursuit of authentic vintage speed parts, means that—blessedly!—our rides are never really done.

It also means that there is a veritable galaxy of castoff, forgotten and unidentified parts floating around out there. From blocks to heads to ignitions to cams, pistons, gears, diffs, steering boxes, axles, wheels… the potential selection of componentry sold at swap meets and traded among greasy-handed friends is almost infinite.

Aftermarket catalogs from the period are indispensable guides, both to identifying what you’ve got and to charting your future performance mods.

Trouble is, the original literature, as you’d expect, tends to have been hard-used and then abandoned to the tattering of time as soon as the next issue showed up in the mail. Recently, I nearly pulled the trigger on one such catalog being offered on an online auction site that had been bid up to around $50 and was described something like: “Oil-stains. Binding mostly missing. Rat-chewed?”

The rarity of these catalogs, in decent usable condition, makes tracking down a comprehensive collection time-consuming and costly.

So, unless holding the actual half-century-plus-old paper in your hands is important to you—and I do appreciate how enjoyable that can be—our friends at Rodder’s Journal have gone to the trouble of gathering a significant library of the literature for us.

The ready-made and affordable reference is comprised of almost 30 catalogs from legendary aftermarket performance parts manufacturers and distributors from the late ’40s through the ’60s like Edelbrock, Bell Auto Parts, Karl Orr, Iskenderian, Chet Herbert, American Racing, Hurst and Mickey Thompson.

This Pandora’s Box of performance is full—over 500 pages!—of products, specs and tips, depicted in catalogs reproduced in their entirety and in full color to look and feel just like the originals. A supplemental directory of the companies still in business, along with their current contact information, is a time-saving bonus.

Any enthusiast would be giddy to receive this box of hot rodding goodness in the mail. To pre-order the Vintage Catalog Collection Boxed Set, visit the store at www.roddersjournal.com, or call 800-750-9550. Cost: $49.95, plus shipping and handling.

The Hemmings Motor News Great Race presented by Hagerty is arguably the quintessential vintage car rally. First run in 1983, it was conceived as a time/distance/endurance rally across the country. Over time it grew to include five divisions – Grand Champion, Expert, Sportsman, Rookie and X-Cup – and is now open to all 1972 and older collectible cars, trucks and motorcycles (yes, a motorcycle competed once). In recent years it’s been massaged to a more manageable 2,400-mile, nine-day test of man and machine that has taken entrants down the east coast, along the Mississippi River and around the Great Lakes. So when it was announced that the 2015 Great Race would return to the west – for the first time in several years – and travel along historic Route 66, it was expected entries would be swiftly submitted.

On October 8 we reported that there were less than 20 spots remaining. Great Race director Jeff Stumb has since announced that the 100-vehicle field has been sold out in record time, and there is a lengthy list of hopefuls waiting to hear of cancellations.

Why cap the number of Great Race entries at 100 (excluding X-Cup, reserved for college and high school teams)? Teams depart each day’s starting line at one minute intervals. When you do that math, it’s easy to understand the limitation, not forgetting the logistics involved for officials and support crews that have to stay one step ahead of the racers.

For 2015, teams will begin arriving in Kirkwood, Missouri, in advance of the now-traditional, equally-challenging warm-up rally, the Hagerty Trophy Run, which will be held on Friday, June 19; reportedly it will trace the eastern end of Route 66 in parts of Illinois. Kirkwood will also serve as the official starting point for the 2015 Great Race on Saturday, June 20, at which point teams will rally to a lunch stop in Rolla before finishing the day’s stage in Springfield, Missouri.

Lunch and dinner stops from there – in order of appearance – are Claremore and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on June 21; Elk City (Oklahoma) and Amarillo, Texas, on June 22; Tucumcari and Santa Fe, New Mexico, on June 23; Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico, on June 24; Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona, on June 25; Kingman and Lake Havasu, Arizona, on June 26; Twentynine Palms and San Bernardino, California, on June 27; and lunch at City of Industry, California, before hitting the finish line in Santa Monica, California, on June 28.

Here are a few tips if you are already thinking of catching segments of the Great Race. As is always the case, the exact rally route is kept secret to prevent teams from practicing. Before the start of each day’s stage, teams are given course instructions just one hour before their start time; no GPS or maps are permitted in the rally vehicles, so drivers and navigators must rely on analog watches and course instructions to get from point A to B successfully and on time. The best locations to see the cars and meet the drivers/navigators are at the day’s lunch and dinner stops. Exact locations for each will become available as details are finalized at each host city. We will provide updates here as they become available, or you can monitor the official Great Race website, where you can also learn more about the Great Race history, rules, and award structure.

The 2015 version of the Hemmings Motor News Great Race presented by Hagerty promises to be bigger and better than ever, with next year’s route tracing the path of Route 66 from Kirkwood, Missouri to Santa Monica, California. As with last year, the number of entrants will be capped at 100 cars (excluding X-Cup entries, reserved for college and high school teams), which leaves less than 19 slots open for the 2015 event.

The reason behind the cap comes down to logistics; with 100 competitors in The Great Race departing one minute apart, the field is spread out across two hours, making it a near impossibility that the race will expand beyond its current size. While the field traditionally fills well in advance of the race, director Jeff Stumb observed that it’s never filled this quickly, with 80-plus entrants received just months after the conclusion of the 2014 event.

Jeff attributes this surge in popularity to the race’s 2015 route. “No one wants to miss Route 66,” he said, “driving it in the Great Race is two bucket list items that can get crossed off at the same time.”

With a “couple dozen” veteran teams not yet registered, Jeff predicts that the cutoff may be reached as soon as November 1. In other words, those considering an entry into the 2015 Great Race would do well to register immediately, if not sooner. For additional details, visit GreatRace.com.

Corky Coker is once again hosting his own Coker Tire Challenge this weekend in and around his home of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is also the location of the headquarters of Coker Tire and of Honest Charlie’s Garage. This will be the 9th annual installment of the Coker Tire Challenge, a three-day time-speed-distance rally that features many of the same race cars that you have seen participating in the Hemmings Motor News Great Race over the last several years.

The race is similar to the Great Race; however, the entire event will begin and end each race day at the same location, making the logistics much easier for the racers and support crews by reducing the carnival “here today, gone tomorrow” atmosphere usually surrounding cross-country distance races.

The rules are the same as those used in the Great Race, and the pre-planned course will wind participants through some of the prettiest scenery in the southern United States. The event officially starts on Friday, September 19 at 8 a.m. in front of the Staybridge Hotel in Chattanooga, with racers returning to Coker Tire Headquarters beginning at 5:30 p.m.

Racers will again be on course beginning at 8 a.m. on Saturday, and are scheduled to return to Coker on Fort Street at approximately 4:40 in the afternoon. This would be a great time to see all the cars participating, as there will be a parc fermé between 4:40 and 6 when you can talk to the racers and see all of the race cars up close.

Racing on Sunday begins at 8 a.m., again from the Staybridge Hotel, and finishes at 11 a.m. at Coker HQ, where this year’s winner will be announced. Last year’s winners, Jody Knowles and Beth Gentry, will certainly be among the favorites, but as they won last year’s event by just 1.74 seconds, it’s really anybody’s trophy to win in this 3-day event.

Hemmings Motor News’ 1932 Ford Speedster is also entered in the race, with publisher Jim Menneto behind the wheel and business manager/navigator Mari Parizo telling her boss where he can go and when.

Dale Bell and Charlie Glick might not have the same name recognition among auto historians as do Barney Oldfield and Harry A. Miller, but the duos do share something in common: Both conspired to build a car for competition, and both ended up with the Golden Submarine. But while the result of one collaboration is lost to time, the result of the other will head to auction this weekend.

According to lore, the inspiration for the original Golden Submarine came when Bob Burman, a racing friend and rival of Oldfield’s, died in April 1916 at the wheel of his open-cockpit Peugeot during a road race in Corona, California. Oldfield ostensibly felt that Burman would have lived had he been safely enclosed inside his car, with a safety cage around him.

Then again, in the spring of 1916, when Oldfield approached Miller, he was also in need of a new mount – his seven-year-old Christie front-wheel-drive race car was “ready for the scrap heap,” in his words – and Miller had just completed his first from-scratch racing engine, a lightweight overhead-camshaft 130-hp 289-cu.in. four-cylinder that would be capable of 120 MPH speeds.

Oldfield debuted the original Golden Submarine in June 1917 to much fanfare and some ridicule, but it would prove itself later that year when Oldfield took four out of seven match races from Ralph De Palma in a Twin Six Packard and when Oldfield proceeded to take down every AAA dirt-track speed record from one to 100 miles.

Later that year, however, Oldfield’s enclosed-cockpit idea nearly killed him when a fuel line ruptured in a crash at Springfield, Illinois, and the Golden Submarine’s single-door jammed. Oldfield fought his way out of the Golden Submarine, but from there on out raced the car in open-cockpit configurations. Though he retired from racing at the end of 1918, he held on to the Golden Submarine for a while longer, handing the wheel over to Waldo Stein and Roscoe Sarles.

Like Oldfield, Dale Bell had a penchant for racing – at least in the Great Race time-speed-distance rallies – and he called up Glick at Heartland Antique Auto Restorations in Paris, Illinois, in late 2005 asking him to build a car to run in the next year’s Great Race – something patterned after an old race car, but also enclosed to keep out the elements during the Great Race. “So I said you’re absolutely describing only one vehicle,” Glick said. “And that’s the Golden Submarine.”

Bell gave Glick seven months to complete the car, but he also handed over a basis for the build: a 1916 Chevrolet with a 171-cu.in. Chevrolet four-cylinder engine of the same vintage, already built for racing with dual SU carburetors.

Glick’s first order of business was to visit the Indianapolis Motor Speedway archives for photos of the original Golden Submarine, which he then took measurements from and scaled up to a little larger than the car’s original size. “I had to make it to fit a regular human, two actually – driver and navigator,” he said. “In those old photos, you see Oldfield really had to squeeze himself into the car.”

He then created a set of patterns for the body and began to hammer it out of sheet aluminum, the same material that Miller used for the original, laying the body panels over a cage of one-inch square aluminum tube, bent to shape. He fabricated both front and rear suspensions as well and adapted four-wheel hydraulic brakes to make it more roadworthy. Hidden headlamps and marker lamps make the car street-legal.

While Glick admits that it’s not as accurate as other replicas out there – Robert “Buck” Boudeman’s replica, for instance, has an authentic Miller engine powering it – he said he worked hard to engineer a measure of reliability into it that a perfect replica wouldn’t have. Indeed, while Bell dropped out of the 2006 Great Race with health issues partway through, he said that the combination of light weight, powerful engine, and favorable model year handicap made it competitive in vintage rallying. “It ran so good, it was almost like cheating,” he said.

Okay, that’s not a real holiday—not that any “take your kid to anything” day is any more real than we make it, but this past weekend, I took my son, Santiago, to the Fifth Annual Domenico Spadaro Memorial Drive.

And we had a blast!

The rally was setup as a “gimmick” rally with driver and navigator pairs getting the route instructions about 30 minutes before departure. Along with the route, there were a couple of pages attached that asked participants to count a few different types of signs and to mark the location of various landmarks along the way.

The Domenico Spadaro Memorial Drive began four years ago, after the death of its namesake, for two reasons: to raise funds for cancer research and to celebrate among friends and family the life of a man who loved Italian cars.

Domenico Spadaro’s White Plains, New York, shop is now run by his three children, Frank, Santo and Vera. The customers remain as loyal as ever and plenty of them showed up early on Sunday morning to share breakfast and then burn some rubber on an approximately 80-mile route in southeastern New York State. Graciously hosted by Mike and Meg Bruno (car collectors themselves) at their Armonk, New York, home, approximately 100 cars attended. If it were a car show and not a rally, it would have been considered a grand success. Largely Italian by origin, the field of rally entrants included a broad list of models from Lancia, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Fiat, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, BMW, Aston Martin, Porsche, Triumph and more. You get the picture.

After the rally, everyone gathered again at the Bruno farm, surrounded by acres of horse pasture, to eat lunch. As several people mentioned, it was more like a family get together that just happened to include a hundred cars and about a gajillion horsepower.

We saw some old friends, including the rally meisters Richard Klein and Walter Eisenstark, and Michael Maddalena, who brought his trick Mercedes-Benz Fintail rally car with him. And we made some new friends, which seems about as good a reason as any to get out and play with old cars. In our case, it wasn’t an old car, but a fun one nonetheless.

The best for me, however, might be that Santiago has really gotten the hang of being my navigator and seems to truly enjoy the event. Of course, the two of us “winning” the rally for the third year in a row might have something to do with it. A nine-year-old kid doesn’t care that the old, busted rally trophy he just received had been gathering dust on someone else’s shelf for 30 years. It might as well be the Borg-Warner Trophy to him.

We often speak around the halls of 222 Main Street about getting kids into this hobby. If you read only the front-page news, they would have you believe that kids today are happy with a tablet or an iPhone and could not care less about automobiles. We beg to differ. They just need the right exposure beyond the typical crossover utility vehicle or vanilla sedan, designed by a computer to be most fuel efficient, that most of us own to get to work each day. Hell, if I were nine years old, the video screen in the minivan would probably be a lot more important to me than the computer-controlled engine without a dipstick under the hood.

But, if you can get your kids—or grandkids—to do something fun, something different, with an old car, then that might just pique their interest. Instead of telling the little man that “We are off to do some old car stuff with a bunch of old grownups,” I simply invited him to be my navigator. It certainly can’t hurt to see the unusual shapes and bright colors of so many vintage sports cars. To his credit, he was fascinated with “the blue one,” Glenn Rudner’s sharp and exhilarating 1957 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint Zagato. Already, I can tell the kid has good taste.

Beyond the cars, he had a great time following the rally route and we got into a rhythm, with him calling out the mileage for the next instruction, whether it was a left or a right turn. To his credit, he corrected me when I thought we were supposed to take a different route. He also noted when a lot of the other participants were playing follow-the-leader and ganging up like lemmings to take a wrong turn. He already knows the number one rule of rallying: Never follow the guy in front of you.

So, before the season ends, find an event to take the young ones to, preferably something where the cars are run and where the owners will let the kids get in them, sniff around the leather, petrol and Castrol, perhaps peer under the hood to see what the world used to be like. They’ll love it. And you won’t regret it.

Just a few years before, the famous New York-to-Paris race wound its way through tsarist Russia, with competitors describing nearly impossible-to-traverse terrain there, some of the worst on the global competition. But by 1914, Russian motoring enthusiasts had not only grown in numbers, they had also organized their own rallies and races and set the stage for the first Russian Grand Prix, which took place in May of that year.

But with the onset of World War I and the Russian Revolution, that Grand Prix would also be the country’s last, at least until the one scheduled for later this year in Sochi. Russians, understandably, are proud of their brief moment in the international motoring spotlight, and so last month the organizers of the third annual Bosch Moskau Klassik paid tribute to the Russian Grand Prix on the occasion of its centennial with a rally around Moscow and some spins around a wetted extreme driving track. The folks from Oldtimer.ru shared some photos and a writeup of the event with us on the My Hemmings pages:

27 crews took off with a minute interval from the national Historic Museum just next to the famous Red Square. Early morning crowds in their hundreds flocked to the city center to see all that historic automotive delicacy in action. The first leg of the run was a classic regularity rally through the historic center of Moscow, while the second one took place on the Federal Guard Service extreme driving track near Moscow, where the pilots had to show off their driving skills under varying road conditions.

Among the cars which took start that morning were mighty Americans, traditionally loved in Russia – Cadillac De Ville, Chevrolet Corvette and Dodge Charger; English icons of automotive style – Jaguar XK120, E-Type and Austin-Healey; fine examples of German automotive craftsmanship – Mercedes-Benz 300D and BMW 2000CS, and, of course, nostalgic and memorable to the older generation Russian classics of the communist era – Chaika, Volga, Moskvich and Pobeda.

One of the most exciting parts of the competition were paired speed trials, in which two Russian Moskvich’s threw down the gauntlet to some of the best cars in motorsports history – Austin-Healey Mk 3000 and Austin Mini. The outcome, of course, was predictable, but it was a lot of fun both for the drivers and for the spectators. As a result of a tough final race, the winner’s trophy was awarded to the Austin-Healey Mk 3000 crew G.Artamonov/F.Golov, while Belarusian team I.Krishkevich/A.Khaletski on the Austin Mini – last year’s event winners – took second place overall. The third prize deservedly went to a well-known in Russia, automotive journalist A.Pikulenko who drove a Moskvich 2140 Rally.

This year’s edition of Bosch Moskau Klassik celebrated a centenary of the first Russian motorcar race ever to have a Grand Prix title – Grand-Prix d`Automobil-Club de Saint-Petersbourg, held on May 18, 1914. The Grand Prix and a special Bosch trophy were awarded to a German driver Villie Scholl, who came first overall on his Benz racer and covered the distance of 224 km in 1h 48m, showing a spectacular average speed of 123.8 km/h. Notably, the oldest of the vehicles taking part in this year’s Bosch Moskau Klassik turned 100 years old – it was a 1914 Locomobile Model 48 speedster, restored recently in Russia. This 8.6-Liter giant was built on an imposing 3.6-meters chassis and weighs over 3 tons. The start of this exotic beast was quite a show for Muscovites!

Have a story or coverage of an event that you’d like to share? Upload it to My Hemmings and let us know.

Teams are staged for the start of the 2014 Great Race in Ogunquit, Maine. Photo by the author.

On one hand, it’s an epic adventure: 2,400 miles of mostly scenic back roads rarely travelled by those who are more interested in getting from one stop to another in a hurry. In the other hand, it’s an epic adventure: a 2,400 mile mechanical torture test that manages to find the breaking point of everything from headlamp brackets to entire transmissions, and then some. And somewhere in between these two extremes, the racers, navigators, support crews and volunteers who sign up to tackle those 2,400 miles do so as a family. Friendships are formed and rekindled; teams help other teams in distress; and there’s genuine care about the well being of all involved. It’s what makes the annual Great Race the pivotal pre-1972 vintage car rally that it is.

To quickly recap, the Great Race was conceived as a time/distance/endurance rally for vintage vehicles. First run in 1983, it has evolved over time to include five divisions – Grand Champion, Expert, Sportsman, Rookie and X-Cup – and is now open to all 1972 and older collectible automobiles, trucks and motorcycles (yes, a motorcycle competed once). If you’re curious as to how the divisions are organized, here’s how it works. Grand Champions – comprised of a driver, navigator, or both, who have won the Great Race prior. Expert – drivers and/or navigators who have had success in the race, but never won overall. Sportsman – usually the largest class of competitors, it is comprised of teams that have done the Great Race before but have yet to find major success. Rookies – self explanatory (this year, there were 39 rookie teams competing). X-Cup – designed to entice high school and college students to both compete in the Great Race and become involved in the collector car hobby.

The 2014 edition, which began in the seaside tourist town of Ogunquit, Maine, and finished in one of the largest retirement communities on the east coast – The Villages, Florida – marked the second consecutive year I’ve had the honor of participating. Along with my colleagues Jim O’Clair, Jeff Chao and Carson Cameron, I followed driver (and publisher) Jim Menneto and navigator Mari Parizo through each leg of the 13-state, nine-day journey that made stops in 17 cities between the start/finish bookends. Reporting on the day’s activities, division leaders and overall standings were followed by hours of hopscotch driving and car maintenance, leaving little down time to reflect on what passed in front of our eyes. But now that the adrenalin has subsided and another chapter of the Great Race has been written, I finally have the chance reflect on the little things that, in most cases, were unseen by the casual observer.

Semi lift gates have more than one purpose. As evidence, I snapped this shot with my cell phone at 9:38 p.m. in the parking lot of the Valley Forge Resort Casino in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, which also doubled as the day’s finish line. We were just wrapping up some much-need maintenance on our 1932 Ford Speedster, which had just traversed perhaps the most undesirable road conditions we’ve ever faced, when word was passed to us that Jeff and Eric Fredette were well on their way towards swapping out transmissions in their 1933 Ford pickup. Contenders for the overall lead going into the day, they managed to limp in with an ailing transmission. A replacement was kindly donated by a spectator who heard of their trouble, and to expedite the swap the Fredette team removed the front end sheet metal and used the lift gate on the Coker Tire rig to get the job done. Their effort, which wrapped up after one in the morning, kept the team in contention right to the bitter end. Incidentally, those horrific frost-damaged roads in the Pennsylvania Poconos had an impact on more than one team. Grand Champion Rex Gardner (1998 and 1999 Great Race winner) and grandson Kolton Hastert apparently found themselves briefly airborne while negotiating the day’s route, and upon landing witnessed the transmission in their 1935 Ford three-window coupe fail in epic fashion. Though sidelined from the race, they opted to follow it to the finish, just like Mary and Ted Stahl, whose beautiful 1936 Auburn 851 Phaeton gave up just one mile from the Pennsylvania border on I-84 in New York.

Never underestimate a Japanese car. There were four international teams entered in this year’s Great Race: Team Wildfire’s 1966 Jaguar 3.8S (Tom Nawojczyk and Wally Leach – both from the United Kingdom); The Krauts’ (as printed in the program – Thomas and Benjamin Karr from Germany) 1934 Ford Deluxe Phaeton; McPherson College with their 1957 Ford Fairlane (whose driver, Jake O’Gorman hales from Canada); and Toshi Team Wam with Guillermo Wam of Florida and Toshi Haru from Japan. Pictured above is their steed – a right-hand-drive 1970 Nissan Laurel. Never seen without a smile, Toshi and his team arrived in Ogunquit without a Timewise calibrated speedometer and a mere handful of tools. Picking up a few words of English along the way, Toshi and the little car that could managed to make it to the finish without major issues. They finished 82nd of 82 cars that completed the race – 40 minutes and 59 seconds off perfect; but that didn’t seem to matter to them. They finished. Toshi fittingly received the Everyone’s Friend award at the banquet, and it sounds like he intends to run the 2015 Great Race.

Do what it takes. Never was this more apparent to us than right at the starting line. As we’ve reported prior, Team Hemmings was the second car out of the gate in Ogunquit, except that the start was not an auspicious one: The clutch pedal rod snapped, leaving the car stalled in first gear with a few thousand onlookers – and us as a team – wondering if there was some kind of joke being played out. Forced to push-start the car past the green flag, Jim nursed it three miles in heavy traffic in first gear to the town’s Welcome Center where, after retrieving our truck full of tools, we cut a length of bottle jack handle to use as a sleeve, hopefully enabling Jim and Mari to continue on to both the lunch stop in Rochester, New Hampshire, and the dinner stop in Lowell, Massachusetts. One of the unsung heroes of many a Great Racer, Hal Everett immediately immersed himself in our Ford at the Lowell stop, welding the two chunks of otherwise useless metal back together again. In a page right out of the ”do not attempt this at home” manual, Hal’s welding goggles had gone missing, so instead he borrowed two other sets of sunglasses – which he positioned over his own – to help him get the job done. Later in the evening, Naomi Schnell – nurse and mechanic extraordinaire – helped us create some extra clearance on the floorboard for that new weld. Both Hal and Naomi worked tirelessly each night, helping any team in need, often past midnight.

One Meat. Sounds kinda bland. Boring. It is. But when a lunch or dinner stop is facing a lot of hungry, thirsty and often tired racers, crews and staff, what’s the easiest way to offer some kind of nourishment? Let’s do some math here for perspective. This year there were 109 teams entered. A total of 104 started the race, but multiply that by two – driver and navigator, which brings the number of people to 208. Now throw in some 35 or so Great Race staff and volunteers, a few extra crew members per cars – and we can’t forget that some teams were swapping drivers and navigators during the race – the number of hungry mouths easily swelled to 500; give or take a few. At the banquet in The Villages, there were 450 meals dished out. So one meat sounds like a logical way to go for the host cities. Or, as was the case this year, a slice of cold peperoni pizza at one stop. Really?! Note to cities petitioning for a stop for 2015: Offer more than one kind of meat – please. A hot dog, bag of chips and a glass of something that was supposed to be sweat tea does not cut it, nor does it evoke the thought “Gee, I could come back to visit Portsmouth, Virginia.”

Feeling Hot. I’m not talking about a popular song played at most weddings; I’m talking about the weather. If you’re considering joining the Great Race extravaganza, we suggest you increase your budget for lots of water and other suitable thirst aids. In just one day we went thru three bags of ice and a case of bottled water – not including what we received at the lunch and dinner stops. Once we got into southern Pennsylvania, the temperature continued to rise the further south we went. At one point, Jim O’Clair – who rode his Harley-Davidson most of the distance – reported the ambient temperature was 105 degrees. Cool towels help, but only briefly when 90-plus cars are parked on a paved lot on a 95-degree day after four hours of negotiating the rally route.

The Sights. In spite of the hours of ceaseless driving, heat, storm threats, mechanical malfunctions, late dinners, awful trailer parking conditions, bad roads, insane traffic and the occasional grumpy city volunteer, most of us would never see the sights we passed. It’s hard to view the vintage car lots and the drug store where Pepsi was invented from 40,000 feet. Or have dinner on the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV-10). Smart phones – in spite of how aggravating they can be – have a neat little camera that take some decent shots. It’s the one thing I regret this year: I didn’t use it as often as I should have to capture the brief moments of time along the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie, New York, or the historic section of New Bern, North Carolina (birthplace of Pepsi, incidentally). Take a moment – albeit briefly – and capture that sight for posterity. You may never have the opportunity to see it again.

Great Race 2015. It was announced at the banquet in The Villages that the Hemmings Motor News Great Race presented by Hagerty will be heading to the desert southwest during the third week of June. Though many of the details and exact route are still in the planning stages, the race will start alongside the Mississippi River in Missouri and will meander along and/or on Route 66 before finishing on the southern California coast. Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona are all on the preliminary map. Entries are already being accepted for 2015. Visit GreatRace.com for more information. I hope to see you along the way.

Irene and Barry Jason in their 1966 Ford Mustang. Photos by Matt Litwin.

In 30-plus years of Great Race history, nobody has run a perfect day, nobody has won the race in a postwar car, and nobody has won the race three years in a row. But husband-and-wife team Barry and Irene Jason of Keller, Texas, pulled off all three feats this year when they crossed the finish line this past weekend in The Villages, Florida, in their 1966 Ford Mustang.

The perfect day for the Jasons, running in the Grand Champion class, came on the first day of this year’s Maine-to-Florida race, when they aced every one of the day’s four legs. While they didn’t repeat the perfect day throughout the rest of the nine-day, 12-state, 2,400-mile rally, they did scatter 10 more aces throughout their run for a cumulative score of 1:02, or 19 seconds ahead of the next closest competitor, Expert division winners Jeff and Eric Fredette in a 1933 Ford pickup.

One reason a postwar car hasn’t won the Great Race is the handicap factoring that rewards drivers of older cars. Even without that advantage (a 1966 Mustang qualifies for a handicap factor of 0.98 while, say, a 1916 Hudson like the one driven by Howard and Douglas Sharp qualifies for a handicap factor of of 0.66), the Jasons held a five-second margin over the Fredettes in the final scoring and a 17-second margin over Wayne Bell and Curtis Graf, two former Great Race champions driving a 1932 Ford, who took second in the Grand Champion class.

While the Jasons made this year’s run in a Mustang, they won both the 2012 and 2013 Great Races in a 1935 Ford five-window coupe. For the win, the Jasons took home a check for $50,000.

For more information about this year’s Great Race, visit GreatRace.com.